I don’t blame them for wanting to hold onto their walking sticks. Edoras has about the worst wheelchair / handicapped access I’ve ever seen. If you take a bad step at the entrance to the Golden Hall, you won’t stop rolling until you’re outside of the city.

Laying that aside, this is a great case of, “a small change to the script throws the whole conversation into the blender and hits liquify.” If you have a conversation which requires information to be revealed in a certain order, you can bet the players will – without even trying – turn the whole thing sideways and backwards. They will trick you into revealing the catch to doing a job before they’ve agreed to do it, or goad you into revealing a loophole in the local rules while they still have the opportunity to exploit it.

Shamus, You owe me one keyboard…. I was drinking a nice hot cup of coffee as I read “uh, and sharp.” This resulted in the aforementioned coffee exiting my nose (well, not all of it – some went into my lungs instead) and depositing itslef all over my keyboard… which now refuses to behave. Luckily, being an IT puke, I have a spare (well, more like 10 or 15 spares).

If you have a conversation which requires information to be revealed in a certain order, you can bet the players will – without even trying – turn the whole thing sideways and backwards. They will trick you into revealing the catch to doing a job before they've agreed to do it, or goad you into revealing a loophole in the local rules while they still have the opportunity to exploit it.

ow! ow! ow! Visualizing the wheelchair ride to Rohan really hurt. Gandalf’s face is probably the best or at least the most apt screen capture yet. I don’t quite understand why the guard didn’t just say “well you’re not getting in anyway.” But it was still really funny. And it is definitely true that people will be quoting D. M. of the rings in future games for years.

Stark – C’mon! You haven’t learned not to read DMotR while drinking hot beverages, operating heavy machinery, or performing certain surgeries? I can’t drink anything for at least 20 minutes after reading, because I never know when my mind will suddenly remind me of a line (that players will be quoting in D&D campaigns for generations to come):

“Being invisible isn’t as useful as you’d think when fighting a blind creature underwater with your bare hands.”
“Welcome Noble Champions. Here are some pointy sticks. Feel free to sleep on our dirt.”
“Which is more work: making new boats or killing us and finishing the quest yourselves?”
“Let us rescue our dear friends, whose names escape me at the moment.”

Yesterday’s and today’s each had several it would be odious to list here. At least until another 10 episodes have gone by and I want to do more reminising…

Mr Young, you have surpassed yourself. My wife (fernmonkey) and I are grinning like idiots here. The freeze frames of Gandalf in panels 3 and 4 are priceless in themselves, and then the conversation where the players derail the plot had me thinking “Yes, yes, this is exactly what a bunch of PCs would be saying. I’ve played with these guys!” Fernmonkey corrects me that we’ve been these guys.

Wait a moment.
Did the DM just let his bunch of bloodthirsty, loose(weapon)handed, loot-mad killing anti-Railroad Players enter the same hall where a foul wormtongue is about to show her presence soon?

Oh Woe.
The Death of Gollum will be a minor disturbance compared to the possible disaster they could wield here o.0

No, really. A quiver of little walking sticks. See, I have these companions who are three foot tall, and . . .
What do you mean, likely story? I’ve just run across half of bleeding Rohan chasing the little buggers!

Would edit if I could since I just posted a minute ago, but wikipedia says that Wormtongue is a he

>>GrÃ­ma, called (the) Wormtongue, is a fictional character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. *He* appears in blah blah *He* is introduced in The Two Towers as blah blah *he* secretly fell in league with Saruman

I love muttering “Wormtongue!” in a menacing Gandalf mimicry when I see the Doctor on “Deadwood”. Silly, but fun.

My current fave character had just been kitted out with his supplies when the first scene of my DM’s scenario had me knocked unconscious, stripped of nearly everything and chucked in a dungeon guarded by hyooge spiders. Yeah, that’s not a nice memory, but you have to trust your DM the way you trust the sun to do it thing, you know. Character’s still alive, so why not roll that way?

Sigh – if there were more sites like this, I’d never leave the computer alone. I’m-a keep readin’.

Well, there would have been an easy way out of this… Gandalf still has Glamdring (that fancy sword), doesn’t he? The animated LotR aside, I don’t think it was destroyed against the Balrog. So, he could hand his elven-forged Sword of Serious Hurt to the guards, hence prompting the players to do the same. AND then hang on to his ‘walking stick’.

Of course, it is much easier to think about these things when the players don’t expect you to respond in 10 seconds or less.

As for the funny, the current version probably works better than having the players gripe about the Uber-NPC putting one over them, again. :)

The only thing missing in this nigh-perfect piece of guard-wrangling is Gandling snickering (in NPC voice of course) in the last panel. As I GM, I usually have my best laughs when the PCs manage to do some serious fast talk.

[…] this comic on abodes while it was fresh, but I didn’t read it at that time. Anyway, the comic pokes at the basics. Ride checks don’t always make sense, sloth always insisted on giving names to places and […]

“And a quiver of little walking sticks.” Wow, I’m glad I put my drink dow. I have to remember that one. Our DM will try to piss us off when we see the lord in Brindol. Then again, I can cast some fun spells. In fact, none of us need weapons… well, there is our rogue, I guess.

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[…] this comic on abodes while it was fresh, but I didn’t read it at that time. Anyway, the comic pokes at the basics. Ride checks don’t always make sense, sloth always insisted on giving names to places and […]